In looking around at the certificates that they support, I was not surprised to find that they accepted no other certificates as valid – only their own. That means it would be trivial to man in the middle any outbound HTTPS connection, so even if they do allow outbound access to Google’s JSON location API it wouldn’t help, because the connection and contents can be monitored by them.
13. In looking around at the certificates that they support, I was not surprised to find that they accepted no other certificates as valid – only their own. That means it would be trivial to man in the middle any outbound HTTPS connection, so even if they do allow outbound access to Google’s JSON location API it wouldn’t help, because the connection and contents can be monitored by them. Likewise, no other governments can man in the middle any connections that the North Koreans have (I’m saying that with a bit of tongue in cheek, because of course they can according to Wikileaks docs, but this probably makes the DPRK feel better — and more importantly they probably don’t know how to do it in the same way as the NSA does, so they have to rely on draconian Internet breaking concepts like this).
I would be shocked if the DPRK is not doing this.
It's also a potential security issue since many of those certificate re-signing devices fail to verify the original certificates first, causing them to happily re-sign traffic that was already MITMed and erase all of the evidence.